"
The Chemist clasped his hands, and looked, with trembling fear and
pity, from the sleeping boy to the Phantom, standing above him with
his finger pointing down.
"Behold, I say," pursued the Spectre, "the perfect type of what it
was your choice to be. Your influence is powerless here, because
from this child's bosom you can banish nothing. His thoughts have
been in 'terrible companionship' with yours, because you have gone
down to his unnatural level. He is the growth of man's
indifference; you are the growth of man's presumption. The
beneficent design of Heaven is, in each case, overthrown, and from
the two poles of the immaterial world you come together."
The Chemist stooped upon the ground beside the boy, and, with the
same kind of compassion for him that he now felt for himself,
covered him as he slept, and no longer shrank from him with
abhorrence or indifference.
Soon, now, the distant line on the horizon brightened, the darkness
faded, the sun rose red and glorious, and the chimney stacks and
gables of the ancient building gleamed in the clear air, which
turned the smoke and vapour of the city into a cloud of gold. The
very sun-dial in his shady corner, where the wind was used to spin
with such unwindy constancy, shook off the finer particles of snow
that had accumulated on his dull old face in the night, and looked
out at the little white wreaths eddying round and round him.
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